The Earliest Masks According to archeological findings and ethnological documentation, the earliest masks may have originated from the kind of witchcraft that prehistory people believed was able to boost their hunting. Before going hunting - sometimes during hunting as well - prehistory people would wear hats in the shape of bird or animal heads, paint their faces and decorate their bodies with bird feathers or animal skins to lure in games or take them off guard. It is believed that masks originate from makeup of this sort.
    At first, prehistory people did not have a definite supernatural for worshipping. When hunting and fishing for survival, they tended to disguise themselves as their games - for example, by placing animal heads on their own heads and wearing animal skins - to take their games off guard. Repeated success in hunting and fishing prompted them to believe that this way of doing things helped them develop a relationship of sympathy with animals and birds. As time went by, this belief eventually developed into different kinds of witchcraft that gave birth to the earliest masks.

Bridge between Human, Divine Worlds

Prehistory people lived in a dangerous, unpredictable world, a world full of unpredictable, hostile forces that was threatening their very subsistence. Witchcraft, as they believed, was the only thing on which they could depend to bring such forces under control.
    Witchcraft was exercised by witches or sorcerers. The Chinese character for “witch” or “sorcerer” dates from several thousand years ago, when people kept records of what they did by carving pictographic scripts on oracle bones. The oracle bone script for “witch” or “sorcerer” looks like a man dancing with the tail of an ox in his hands. This suggests that dancing is the main activity of the witches or sorcerers at sacrificial ceremonies, which was meant to invite gods or goddesses to descend on earth by entertaining them. On such an occasion, the witch or sorcerer invariably wore a mask, which was an important part of his makeup to please the god or goddess.
    As evidenced by pictures on numerous cultural relics, ancient people seemed to believe that the more strange and awe-inspiring the makeup of a sorcerer or witch, the greater would be the magic power of the witchcraft being exercised in inviting divine protection. In other words, the mask was intended to bring to life the supernatural the sorcerer or witch was inviting to come down. That may explain why since ancient times, there have been masks in thousands of designs. Here is an ethnic Miao saying at Dejiang, Guizhou Province: One is divine with a mask on and returns to the mortal world the moment he takes off his mask. The saying, we believe, is a convincing proof that masks are used to bridge the divine and human worlds.

Head Worshipping and Masks

As prehistory people saw it, the head, which features a concentration of the eyes, ears, mouth and nose, was the most important and most mysterious part of the human body. That explains why sorcerers and witches always gave the heaviest makeup to their heads when exercising witchcraft. Masks are, as a matter of fact, exaggerated imitations of the human and animal heads. Basing ourselves on this understanding, we may conclude that in some ways, masks originate from head worshipping by prehistory people, along with their worshipping of the souls of the dead.
    Worshipping of life promoted the development of masks. Fear of death and pursuit of life together prompted prehistory people to ask whence the human being, and where would a person go after the person’ mortal existence ended. The life of a person is so short, while the heaven and earth are eternal, giving rise to the old belief that after the person died, the person’s soul would stay alive eternally in the other world. There was also the belief that the person’s soul was innate in his or her bones, in particular the skull, which is documented in numerous ancient Chinese records.  In one of his books, Theodor Lipps (1851-1914), a German anthropologist, gave a description of what he chose to call the “worshipping of the skull,” which he saw as the origin of masks. The objects of such worshipping, he stated, were not limited to skulls of prehistory people’s ancestors. Any human skull was worshipped, whether it was the skull of a friend or the skull of an enemy.
    There are numerous historic records about how some ethnic minority groups living in China’s deep south had followed the tradition of chopping off strangers’ heads for worshipping. This gruesome custom continued until the end of the 1950s in areas of the ethnic Wa people in Yunnan Province. Before sowing in spring and after harvest in autumn, an elaborate ceremony was held in ethnic Wa villages, at which the heads of some unfortunate intruders were worshipped. The entire village would turn out for the ceremony, dancing round the village’s communal hall for a whole day. After that, the heads would be placed atop a pole in a forest outside the village, and dancing would continue for three more days round the village’s communal hall.
    It is a long time since this kind of primitive “head hunting” ceased to exist as an ethnic custom. In some parts of China, however, there is still the practice of using blood from believers’ foreheads to please the supernatural. In Tongren County, Qinghai Province, ethnic Tibetan and Tu people hold a ritual every year to offer human blood to the local guardian gods. Adult men have their foreheads cut by the sorcerer for blood, and sometimes the sorcerer cuts his own forehead. It is believed that the more “forehead blood” is offered, the more pious would the local people be.
    Use of human heads and blood at sacrificial ceremonies has largely become a thing of the past. At sacrificial ceremonies held by people of ethnic Tibetan, Mongolian, Yugur, Tu and Naxi groups, these have long been replaced by artificial skulls or masks resembling human and animal skeletons. Worshipping of the human skull and bones is most evident at religious ceremonies held in Buddhist temples in areas inhabited by ethnic Tibetans, at which all dancers have human skeleton masks on. 
    Over the past millenniums, ancestors of China’s ethnic minority groups went through different historic periods separately featuring belief in witchcraft, worshipping of nature, worshipping of totems, worshipping of the supernatural and ancestral worshipping. People created a multitude of masks during those periods to bring back to life what they worshipped - souls, spirits, gods and goddesses, ancestors of the human race and heroes and heroines, in hope that by doing so, they would get closer to the divine world, the dreamland of theirs. Masks found in China are in countless varieties, forming a kaleidoscopic picture of China’s ethnic minority groups in different stages of historic development.
    Shamans, or sorcerers and witchdoctors of Shamanism that used to be popular in northeast China, are known to have at their disposal a big pool of masks representing gods, goddesses and spirits. So do the ethnic Daurs, also in northeast China, whose masks and figurines, large and small, are so many that if lined up one close to another, the “queue” would be a dozen meters long. These are made of locally available materials - timber, iron, straw, animal skins and cloth. The mountain god known as “Bainacha” is revered by all the ethnic Ewenkes who, like the Dawo’ers, used to make a living by hunting. Bainacha is the guardian of the wild animals prowling the forests and therefore is worshipped as the hunting god. Ewenke hunters often stripped bare the lower part of a tree trunk, on which they would paint a “portrait” of the god that looks like an amiable old man. When passing by the tree, hunters and all other people would lose no time to alight from their horses, kneel down before the god, and knock their heads on the ground while offering him wine and meat.